Stellar network records significant growth in transactions, assets and user accounts this year

The Stellar Lumens cryptocurrency may have lost 85% of its price this year amidst cryptocurrency bear market, but that hasn't prevented the network from growing. While it took almost four years to get the number of accounts to go up from 0 to 1 million, it took only two months to double that number according to the network's official Reddit.

The network, which had less than 120 k accounts, now has more than 2 million accounts. This translates to a growth of more than 10 times during the current year. Addition of the high number of accounts within a short while is because Stellar has been forming partnerships with several companies to expand activity around the world, as well as other marketing activity such as airdrop.

The platform, which now has more than 2,800 assets representing a 970 percent increase compared to last year figure, was a host to more than 7.7 million trades this year compared to only slightly above 140,000 last year and 162 in 2016. The platform had 44 assets in 2016 and 287 in 2017. The number of processed operations also grew by more than 9,000 percent to close to 210 million this year compared to about 2 million last year.

Such growth, amidst a bear market, tends to agree with the proposition that, in the cryptocurrency space, the price wouldn't always reveal or mirror market or network growth, meaning some other factors may actually be behind the drop and bear market.

The Stellar network, which is a blockchain that connects banks, payments systems and people; recently formed partnership with Blockchain.com, after which it held a $125 million airdrop, becoming the network to perform the largest airdrop in the market ever.

Stellar is also working in partnership with IBM for a program that makes possible low cost and instant cross-border payments for merchants in the South Pacific region. IBM will be using IBM is using Stellar Lumens (XLM) in these projects.

IBM said it chose the network because it has a non-profit status, it is scalable, it has a professional team, it provides token ownership transparency and it has the ability to support any asset type. This is according to a comment from IBM Offering Leader at IBM Blockchain Financial Solutions Jo Lang regarding the partnership.

IBM's USD-backed stablecoin called Stronghold USD (which is in private beta) is already on blockchain and through it, companies can do payments, and foreign exchange between themselves, in a seamless, friction and secure manner. Banks can also transfer value in real time using Lumens (XLM) on the IBM Blockchain World-Wire. It helps companies avoid maintaining costly foreign currencies in nostro and vostro accounts. This means the networks will compete directly with Ripple.

Stellar also recently participated in a project called The Diruna, through which they acquired more than 1 million new active accounts. Diruna is a cryptocurrency created on the Stellar blockchain and works like a marketplace that allows payments in DRN crypto, and buyers get loyalty points they can later redeem on the same marketplace. Users are required to have a Stellar Wallet to store the crypto.